Barra F, Davidovitch B, Levermann A, Procaccia I
Department of Chemical Physics, The Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel.
Phys Rev Lett. 2001 Sep 24;87(13):134501. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.87.134501. Epub 2001 Sep 7.
It had been conjectured that diffusion limited aggregates and Laplacian growth patterns (with small surface tension) are in the same universality class. Using iterated conformal maps we construct a one-parameter family of fractal growth patterns with a continuously varying fractal dimension. This family can be used to bound the dimension of Laplacian growth patterns from below. The bound value is higher than the dimension of diffusion limited aggregates, showing that the two problems belong to two different universality classes.